A great start to 2012!

This morning we kicked-off the long-awaited and much-anticipated Journey for 2012! There seems to be a lot of buzz and excitement. A lot more people were at church today than I expected. I just figured with holiday traveling, sorry weather, and the fact that it was New Year’s Day that attendance would be way down. I even noticed two lawyers in our congregation getting on their iPhones to sign up for the YouVersion reading plan. That’s got to count for something!

It was great to see Jesse Cragwall at church today. He got a holiday leave of absence from Afghanistan and will be in for a couple of weeks. I hope to have him share with the church on the 14th about Global Planting Initiative, the new missions organization he’s starting after his deployment is finished. He’s an incredible guy. And you can see the joy on his and Leslie’s faces that he’s able to be home.

Next week we’ll get to hear about Hope Resource Center from Lisa Hardin, one of our members, who is the Executive Director. I think it will be awesome—and perfect—for at least two reasons: the message is about the first 11 chapters of Genesis, which tells how humanity got its start. Gen. 1:27-28 (from today’s reading) says:

So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply...”

Tragically ironic, isn’t it? We intrinsically bear God’s image. He gave us the gift of sex and told us to multiply in the context of marriage. But now we shamelessly disregard his purpose for sex and make legal the taking of human life by abortion. Hope Resource Center is a way Christians can show Christ’s love to women who find themselves in crisis pregnancies and many times save lives of children who could be aborted.

I already can’t wait for next Sunday! It’s going to be a great year.